The London Nobody Knows

Four years ago (so long?) I wrote about Finisterre, the film by Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans, sountracked by Saint Etienne, about London. Today I finally got to see a film they acknowledge as an influence, and whose source book is quoted during the film: The London Nobody Knows.

Filmed in 1967, and featuring, as Phil Gyford put it, "James Mason wandering around in flat cap and jacket, pointing at things with a rolled umbrella" as a "guide/narrator" (unlke Finisterre, which relies on a disembodied voiceover from Michael Jayston), the film looks around parts of Victorian - and older - London that were in the process of being lost as part of the great upheavals of the 1960s. (Oddly, London seems more vulnerable to rebuilding than disasters; most of the buildings that are now being lost, like Drapers Gardens and Mondial House, date not from the immediate post-war years, but from the 1960s, while the 1950s buildings that more closely followed pre-war styles are left alone.)

However, the nostalgia for a vanishing London is tempered not just by Mason's commentary, which seems to veer from celebrating things like the music hall and steam trains to dismissing them in a heartbeat, but also by the people featured. There's a close look at men staying at the Salvation Army's hostels, followed by those even more down on their luck, drinking meths and fighting on the streets.

Forty years on, though, and as well as things you don't miss, there are things you do. Camden's Roundhouse is surrounded by a goods yard, presumably on the point of closing down. The south bank of the Thames is featured a couple of times; there's a humourous diversion into an Egg Breaking Plant, and Mason looks down Cardinal Cap Alley, beside the house Christopher Wren never actually saw. Of course, that house is still there, but the power station lurking behind - which isn't mentioned - is now an art gallery (where, oddly, we were actually watching the film).

Then there are the parts of London that are still with us, but changed somewhat. A segment on Spitalfields shows kids running and play-fighting in the streets, while Mason describes it as "once for the wealthy, but now down at heel". Chapel Market's shops are featured; there's still a Sainsbury's there, but it's moved down the road, and the market's more about cheap socks than fruit and veg, and the pie shop presumably no longer sells live eels. (I'd like to watch the film again just to make sure the old gentleman really does put chilli sauce on his pie and mash.) The very start of the film shows the towers along London Wall being built, and the area around there, as I've lamented before, is not what it was.

As we emerged from the auditorium, I was wondering if any other cities inspire such a tradition of film-making - for as well as these two, there's also Patrick Keiller's London, and those are merely the ones that are regulars on the London art films circuit. Perhaps this is my London-centricity at work, but I don't think they do. Tokyo has inspired Wim Wenders, but perhaps this is a sign of its (for Westerners) otherworldliness; do the Japanese care as much? New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all strike me as finding more life as fictional settings than as real cities for documentaries.

Sadly the film isn't (yet?) released on DVD. As I say, though, it is a regular at venues such as the ICA, who showed it with a perfect partner for padding to release length, Every Day Except Christmas. Obviously, though, I'd recommend it as worth watching, if you can catch it, and I hope that there's a way to liberate it from its current availability limbo.